Protein folding via machine learning may spawn medical advances

Introduction

In an advance that may presage a dramatic new era of pharmaceuticals and medicine, DeepMind (a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company) recently applied their machine learning software to the challenging problem of protein folding, with remarkable success. In the wake of this success, DeepMind and other private companies are racing to further extend these capabilities and apply them to real-world biology and medicine.

The protein folding problem

Protein folding is the name for the physical process in which a protein chain, defined by a linear sequence of amino acids, assumes its equilibrium 3-dimensional structure, a process that in

Continue reading Protein folding via machine learning may spawn medical advances